The banner ad is one of the most prevalent forms of Internet advertising today. Depending on the message, banner ads come in many shapes and sizes. As the Internet has matured, companies have had to balance the use of web page space between content, which is ultimately why a user goes to a particular web site, and advertising, which is one of the primary sources of revenue for Internet companies.
Because space for both content and advertising on a highly trafficked web site such as Yahoo!'s home page is very valuable, using as little space as possible is very advantageous. Thus, there is a desire in the Internet advertising industry to maximize use of space on a web page so as to fit as much content and advertisements as possible while maintaining a clean and attractive look and feel of the web page.
Moreover, it is desirable to provide interactive advertising that permits a user to interact with one or more features of the advertisement, which has an added benefit of focusing the user's attention on the advertisement. One way to make an Internet advertisement interactive is to add vectored graphics and/or streaming media (e.g., streaming audio or video) to the advertisement. By way of background, Macromedia Flash is one type of cross-platform compatible vector-based graphic animation tool. Vector-based images, which are also referred to as object-oriented graphics, use geometrical formulas to represent images. Vector-oriented images are more flexible than other types of images, such as bit maps, because they can be resized and stretched. Presently, although vector-based graphic animation tool, such as Macromedia Flash, provide the capability to embed streaming media elements, these tools have very rudimentary streaming media player capabilities.
Thus, in order to provide streaming media capabilities in a vector-based graphic player, a customized player must be specifically developed and hard-coded for a particular application. Such hard-coded players lack the ability to be reused for subsequent purposes and must be at least partially recoded in the event the streaming content is changed. Moreover, because such players are typically built on a “one-off” basis, the players lack the ability to integrate with existing streaming media administration and development tools. Thus, there is a need and desire for a system that provides core streaming media player functions and controls in a vector-based graphic animation environment.